The Road Less Travelled

A recent Daily Prompt was: Pinpoint a moment in your past where you had to make a big decision. Write about that other alternate life that could have unfolded. My thoughts on this one are slightly different to the brief, so I hope you can bear with me.

What’s so bloody wrong with the road well travelled?

When did being on the common track become such a bad thing? I wonder if this obsession with being different has been popularised by people for whom “abnormal” isn’t an option? People who have the luxury of taking normal for granted, people who never have to aspire to normalcy because they are already there. I don’t feel like a lesser person because I have what some would consider very boring life aims:

Be successful in my chosen career

Have a healthy, happy relationship

See my family as often as possible

Maintain contact with my overseas friends

Enjoy my chosen hobbies & make time to pursue them

This might seem like a boring list. Even now, in my current balanced state of mind, my instinct is to keep adding to the list so that it seems like I live an interesting life…surely this can’t be everything I aspire to! But that’s today. Tomorrow could be a different story. At a moments notice my depression can rob me of my ability to achieve even these most basic of aims. I care less about my work, I avoid contact with family and friends, I can’t be bothered picking up my creative or technical projects.

If life is a journey then achievement of our own personal aims is surely our destination. Personally, I like to think of myself travelling down the highway, with occasional detours to see something interesting or to take a break from it all. And even if I sometimes get lost, I’ll always find my way back to the highway in the end.

I love love love this! I too have been struck with how our society seems to value individuality and unique pursuits above almost anything. But there’s an awful lot of us on the planet for each path to be blazingly different! Clearly each of us is a unique set of traits and experiences but it seems crazy to deny that there is a lot of overlap in the generalities. Thank you for putting this out there.